Panasonic put a 103 inch plasma on the floor in Las Vegas this month and a queue formed to look at it, which is the most honest thing that happened all week. Nobody in that queue was buying one. They wanted to stand close to a screen that costs more than a car and then go home to whatever they already own, which for almost all of them is still standard definition.
That gap is the thing I cannot stop thinking about, because the entire show was built on pretending it does not exist. Toshiba came to sell HD DVD players for spring. The Blu-ray camp came with hardware from Samsung, Pioneer and Panasonic and a story about capacity. Both sides spent the week explaining why their disc is the one you should commit to, and neither seemed troubled that the number of households able to see any difference at all is small enough to be a rounding error.
I think the format argument is close to irrelevant for the next two years, and the people running it know that, which is why it is being fought so hard right now. You do not win a standards war on merit once the market is real. You win it before anyone is paying attention, by locking studios and stuffing retail channels while the installed base is too small to have opinions. Sony learned the opposite lesson expensively enough with Betamax that I doubt they have forgotten it.
What actually decides this is sitting one aisle over, and it is boring. Panel prices are falling faster than anyone selling panels would like. The moment a decent 40 inch set stops being a considered purchase and becomes something people replace a broken television with, the installed base arrives all at once, and whichever format has the cheaper player at that exact moment takes the volume. On today’s pricing that is HD DVD, and I still would not bet on it, because cheaper hardware has lost this kind of fight before when the content went the other way.
Intel spent its keynote slot launching Viiv, which as far as I can tell is a sticker. There is a real platform underneath it and I do not doubt the engineering, but the pitch was that a certified logo will make a PC in the living room finally make sense, and the reason PCs have failed in the living room for a decade has never been certification. It is that nobody wants to manage a computer from a sofa. Gates talked about Vista and the Xbox 360 and was considerably more convincing, mostly because the 360 is an actual product people have actually bought.
I am skipping the automotive and audio halls entirely this year, which were substantial and which I did not have the legs for.
The show I would rather have seen is the one where somebody stood up and said the disc format does not matter because the delivery mechanism is going to change underneath both of them. That was not on the agenda in any hall I walked through, and I suspect that is because the companies best placed to say it are the ones with the most inventory to move first.